Kudzu has overgrown almost 10 million acres in the southeastern United States but imagine that  instead of being a nuisance it could sprout into a dietary supplement. Scientists in Alabama and…

If you listened to the media, a bailout of GM was good for investors.  A few months later, the stock was wiped out.   But if you paid attention to Ford Motor Company while the media ignored…

Birds have a wide variety of vibrant plumages and have evolved various chemical and physical mechanisms to produce these beautiful colors over millions of years.  When did feathers first get…

Little LEGO pieces shaped like pegs can re-create microscopic activity taking place inside lab-on-a-chip devices, also known as microfluidic arrays, at a scale scientists can more easily observe.…

Can even the human form grow tiring?This ORGY of a culture wepresuppose to be endlessly entertaining - perpetually self-gratifying -could it all be an elementary school yard game?Our brains areslowly…

Members of the Research Group Baubotanik at the Institute of Theory of Modern Architecture and Design (University of Stuttgart) have been focusing on the idea of living plant constructions - that's…

Australian scientists believe northern hemisphere pollution in Asia, Europe and North America  is to blame for southern hemisphere rainfall changes.   The new research announced at the…

I've been mean to computational/network/systems biologists recently (twice). Real soon here I'm going to get into some positive aspects of these fields, but before that, I have to slam systems…

Want to drive  the politically correct segment of academia into a  tailspin?   Tell them there's a group of people hurting animals and watch the outrage.   Then tell them they are…

Before blogs, writers could delusionally imagine great things about who was reading them: If you look at the traffic statistics for any newsish website you’ll see that people are reading when they’re…

The story goes back to a conversation between me and Lothar in the summer of 2005. “Which instrument do you like the most Purushottam?“, He asked. “Piano”, I answered quickly. Though I played only…

Sometimes people are attracted to strange things. I still have trouble figuring out how people procreated in the 1970s and 80s - the hair, the moustaches, boys wearing those teeny short shorts - yuck…

What do you do with a petabyte of data? The question came up during a lunch today with two NASA computing people, on in IT and the other in supercomputing.  Modern satellites are returning…

While searching Scientific Blogging to make sure no one had written anything on a topic I'm about to undertake, I saw the following headline under the Science Codex bar on the bottom right of the…

Biomass currently supplies about a third of the developing countries’ energy varying from about 90% in countries like Uganda, Rawanda and Tanzania, to 45 percent in India, 30 percent in China and…

Biomass contributes a significant share of global primary energy consumption and its importance is likely to increase in future world energy scenarios. Current  biomass use, although not…

Is there an "Air Supply" in the bat world?  Not really, though they seem to have love songs, say  researchers at Texas A&M University and the University of Texas at Austin So let's…

Women hedge and issue disclaimers and ask questions when they communicate, all traits that can suggest uncertainty and lack of confidence, but men do the same on gender-specific topics, according to…

UC Santa Barbara scientists have revealed what they call a potential new drug delivery system - a biological mechanism for delivery of nanoparticles into tissue. They developed a peptide, a small…

The so-called SHOX gene (short stature homeobox gene) is responsible for the normal growth of bones and is often mutated in short-stature patients. Short stature is considered when final height of an…